'Whatever mistakes were made in the past,' Barra will say in her testimony before the House Energy and Commerce Committee, 'we will not shirk from our responsibilities now and in the future.' Photograph: Carlos Osorio / AP

This afternoon, its new CEO, Mary Barra, will try to explain to a Congressional oversight panel why GM fought so hard to save its own life during the financial crisis, even as the company stayed silent for a decade when it had the chance to save the lives of drivers. GM has recalled more than 6m produced between 2005 and 2014 – including three new recalls over the past week – in a series of moves that reveal sprawling, systemic corporate incompetence.

“Today’s GM will do the right thing,” Barra will say under oath, according to her prepared remarks. But there is a dark undercurrent to her words, which will only highlight a truth that is no longer excusable: General Motors spent over a decade misleading the public about mechanical failures in its cars, working to create the false image of a rehabilitated powerhouse of American industry.

And it will make you wonder what else GM hasn’t told us – indeed, what it doesn’t even know yet – about its $55bn business.

GM has been good at telling stories that the public wants to hear. In 2009, General Motors was celebrating its birthday by trundling out then-CEO Rick Wagoner in front of Congress to ask for a $50bn taxpayer bailout and beg for the automaker’s life. The company and its rivals were willing to promise anything: to make more hybrid cars, to take $1 salaries for executives, to come up with an entirely new business model. GM painted itself as an unfortunate victim of circumstance, insistent that its troubles were largely attributable to financial reasons, a comfortable version of “bad things happening to good carmakers”: buried under $90bn of debt, struggling with the cost of union pensions, in hock to its bank lenders, GM was the poor sap that needed an infusion of government cash to get past a rough period.

When things looked darkest for our most iconic industry, we bet on what was true: the ingenuity and resilience of the proud, hardworking men and women who make this country strong. Today, that bet has paid off. The American auto industry is back.

We were desperate to believe this.

Less than four months later, it seems foolish that any of GM’s fairy tale was believable to anyone. After the recalls and the estimates of driver deaths, all of that talk – of the reborn American automaker, of bets paid and dollars won – seems like a hollow spectacle.

And it has to make us wonder: how much were US taxpayers and the government complicit in sustaining a company that researchers had already suggested was unable to compete in the modern automotive industry?

“It’s no ‘new GM’ if they’re doing this,” Dartmouth Tuck School of Business professor Paul A Argenti tells me. “If this has been hidden for 10 years, there’s nothing new about the company. It’s old-school GM. It’s stuff you can’t even imagine a company could do in the 21st century.”

Failure like this doesn’t come out of nowhere. It’s buried in a company’s corporate culture. This year, two professors examined what it is, about GM, that set it up for failure.

The General Motors market share in the US fell from 62.6% to 19.8% between 1980 and 2009, noticed Susan Helper and Rebecca Henderson. Helper is now the chief economist at the US commerce department, and Henderson is a management professor at Harvard.

They concluded that “the conventional explanations for GM's decline are seriously incomplete”. Their alternatives: GM’s market share suffered from the same issues as its old rivals, “including a failure to understand the nature of the competition they faced and an inability to respond effectively once they did.”

But the professors found another, crucial reason for GM’s decline: hubris.

We wanted to believe in that, too.

General Motors, like the American government and so many Americans, wanted to believe it was a good company, a successful company, a survivor. It had a proud history, and it’s hard to deny or discard that history. GM play-acted, magnificently, at resilience.

After all, one year after the bailout hearings, General Motors CEO Ed Whitacre triumphantly strode through a car factory, white hair blazing like a founding father, promising America in an ad that the dark days of Government Motors were over. “A lot of Americans didn’t agree with giving GM a second chance,” he crowed, showing just how wrong the skeptics were.

What helped GM was that it couldn’t – or wouldn’t – really see the future; it could only see that glorious history. “Their past success often led to extended periods of denial: Indeed a pattern of denial following extended success appears to be a worldwide phenomenon,” Helper and Henderson write.

If nothing else comes out of today’s hearing, this must: GM has to acknowledge its hubris and show it’s willing to start over from scratch. Can GM actually make a car that’s safe to drive? Saying sorry isn’t enough. GM also has to demonstrate that it did not manipulate Americans and Congress – emotionally and financially – to save a corporate interest that didn’t bother to reciprocate their care and trust.

It’s instructive to examine, in one place, the scale of GM’s failure to make safe cars over the past 10 years. The company’s production standards didn’t just fall; they were low for a long time. GM didn’t make just one mistake: from ignition to transmission to power steering to air bags, it failed at many points to assemble reliable, working cars.

Overall, GM has recalled 6.3m cars over the past couple of months – so far. The range of makes and model years present an impressively sprawling display of incompetence:

1.6m Chevy Cobalts had faulty ignition switches that would turn off the car’s engine if bumped by the driver’s knee and which may have caused 12 deaths.

1.3m Chevy Traverses with faulty airbags.

Another 700,000 cars – ranging from Chevy Silverados to GMC Sierras and Yukons – had loose transmission lines that could cause fires.

Over 300,000 GMC Savana and Chevy Express vans were recalled by the National Highway Safety Traffic Administration over other airbag problems. (GM built those vans between 2009 and 2014, the same years the company was creating a victorious comeback narrative around its bankruptcy.)

Then there are cars GM didn’t bother recall: 2005-vintage Chevy Cobalts and Pontiac Pursuits, which had incorrectly wired airbags that could inflate so aggressively that they would injure, not help, the driver and passenger during a crash. GM chose instead to send a mildly-worded note to dealers, according to one report.

GM isn’t legally liable for the problems with its cars before 2009, because the bankruptcy wiped out its responsibility. But there’s plenty more to answer for, after the bailout. The range of cars includes those made in 2005 all the way up to 2013, 2014 and 2015 models.

“I want you to know that we are completely focused on the problem at the highest levels of the company,” Barra has said. “That is how we want today’s GM to be judged; how we handle the recall will be an important test of that commitment.”

That’s a nice redefinition. How GM handles the recall is a secondary concern at this late stage. More important is how GM handles the manufacture of American cars, and whether the company is worthy of the trust that the American public has stored in the company time and time again, decade after decade. GM ended up $10bn short of what it owed the American government. It’s even deeper in debt to the trust of Americans who believed it was safe to buy its cars.